Urban Projects, Collective Spaces, and Local Identities Elective – subtheme: Solidary Mobile Housing for the Houseless

Co-organisation and tutoring of a Community-engaged Architectural Design Learning elective course at the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture (in collaboration with Prof. dr. Yves Schoonjans and Prof. dr. Burak Pak) at the start of the Solidary Mobile Housing (SMH) co-creation process.

In the framework of this course, fifteen students met weekly with the course tutors and representatives of the targeted end-users: two social workers from SAAMO Brussel (Geraldine Bruyneel and Tineke Van Heesvelde) and a counsellor from CAW Brussel (Dieter Van Den Broeck).

Over the course of the elective, these partners worked together with the architecture students on:

• (1) an analysis of the needs and requirements for SMH,
• (2) the study of inspiring cases from all over the world, and
• (3) the development of a method and criteria for the discovery and selection of a temporary use site.

Moreover, as the SMH Inhabitants had not yet been engaged, two interaction moments with potential future inhabitants were organized at a Brussels homeless reception centre (De Schutting). In this context, an interactive ‘potential user inquiry’ was developed during the elective course to collect more information on their needs and preferences. As this proved to be a handy tool to engage in a dialogue with potential candidates for participation in the SMH project, later in the process, it was also used by the social partners in the context of the end-user engagement process.

The outputs of this course were thus, on the one hand, a potential user inquiry, including several interactive housing and location preference games. On the other hand, this course also resulted in the development of a temporary use site discovery and selection method, allowing the partners to find and evaluate potential temporary use sites in a systematic way, based on different types of co-defined criteria and using location scenarios. During the following months, this method was used and further developed by the SMH project partners to find a suitable location for the SMH pilot project.

Furthermore, the elective students also delivered an inspiring cases booklet, featuring twelve case studies of similar cases from all over the world. These presented the processes, modes of organization, neighbourhood integration, and spatial configuration of these projects. The insights from these cases later helped the SMH partners to co-define the architectural design brief for the SMH project.